A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Have you ever thought what it might be like to live only in the company of women?’ I say to Beatrice once they have passed us by.

  She gives me a curious sideways glance. ‘Not really. Though they seem none the worse for it.’

  ‘I think I might like it.’

  ‘You!’ She is visibly astonished by the notion.

  ‘Why not me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shifts the pot into her other arm and suddenly realising it must be heavy, I take it from her. She smiles, puts her arm through mine. ‘Do you remember Dominique, the boy who sat next to me one Easter term, and how madly in love with you he was?’

  I have forgotten Dominique, but now his face comes back to me, together with the quiff of Tintin hair he had, which stood right out at the top of his head.

  ‘He would stare at you all the time, hoping you’d glance back at him, and in his spare notebook, I would see him drawing you.’

  ‘I think you’re imagining this, Beatrice.’

  ‘No. Didn’t you notice? If you ever spoke to him, he would blush beet red. He was even nice to me when he saw what good friends we were. He would offer both of us sweets at lunchtime. The other boys teased him horribly. Do you ever see any of those children anymore?’ she asks after a moment.

  I shake my head, ‘Do you?’

  She looks away, ‘Never.’

  We have arrived at my mother’s grave. Beatrice gazes at it solemnly, then bends to position the daffodils on the tomb. She stays like that, half-kneeling, for a few moments and when she rises I see there are tears on her face.

  ‘When I was little, I loved your mother more than anyone,’ she murmurs. She stares at the grave for some time in silence as if she is communing with someone and the sight of her there, her face wet, brings the tears to my eyes too. Suddenly I feel I must tell her, say it aloud.

  ‘1978’ Beatrice says. ‘Is that the year she died?’

  I don’t know why she asks this, since it is engraved on the tomb. I nod, ‘In October.’

  ‘Not so long after my mother.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I murmur. ‘I had no idea.’ It is the first time Beatrice has mentioned her mother. I want to ask her more, but she rushes on now visibly changing the subject.

  ‘Was she very ill at the end?’

  This astonishes me. For some reason, I had assumed Beatrice knew. ‘No, no, it was very sudden.’ I mumble. ‘She was knocked over by a car.’

  ‘How terrible for you,’ she says. Her eyes are very large and dark as she looks at me. It is my turn to take her hand. ‘She missed you very much, you know, after you left Paris,’ I lead her away from the grave. I need to make up to her what I robbed her of.

  ‘I missed her,’ Beatrice’s voice cracks. ‘And you, both of you.’

  ‘Beatrice,’ I say, wishing the sun hadn’t chosen this moment to bathe us in its glare, wishing that I were in the darkness of a confessional. ‘Beatrice, that last year, I wanted you away, I wished you away. I’m sorry. I…’

  ‘I know,’ she cuts me off.

  ‘My mother loved you too much.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ her voice has an edge of bitterness which I don’t recognize. She doesn’t really forgive me. I will have to do penance so that she forgives me.

  ‘She would have enjoyed seeing your children, seeing you so well.’ I mumble, and think to myself that she would have been mortified to see her own daughter.

  Beatrice doesn’t speak until the gates of the cemetery are behind us. Then it is as if nothing amiss has occurred.

  ‘You know what I would like,’ she says, looking up at me. ‘I would like a cup of hot chocolate. I’ve had such a busy week. There’s been a conference on top of everything else. So many people from everywhere. I imagine you went to lots of those in New York.’

  The next day, just as the light is dying, an episode to do with Beatrice comes back to me with all the unshadowed clarity of the noonday sun. It must have taken place just before Beatrice broke her leg. Rachel, my other close friend, and I decided to tail Beatrice after school, follow her to the home we had never seen. Our satchels over our shoulders, our giggles repressed to each others ‘shhh’, we followed her through narrow streets and then across a wide boulevard we weren’t supposed to cross to a street dotted with shops. Perhaps it was the Rue St Denis. In front of one of the buildings, Beatrice was stopped by a plump woman wearing a very short skirt. The woman kissed her on both cheeks, but we couldn’t hear what they said to one another, and then Beatrice scurried through a door and disappeared.

  ‘That’s where she lives,’ I announced to Rachel and gazed with something like disappointment at the nondescript building.

  ‘And that must be her mother,’ Rachel said, a note of triumph in her voice. ‘Just look at her stockings.’

  I looked. The stockings were criss-crossed things, like dancers wore.

  ‘Her mother is a pute.’ Rachel pronounced the taboo word with pride. ‘A prostitute.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I bet you.’ She tugged at my arm and pulled me into the recess of a shop door. ‘Just wait.’

  We waited and sure enough, a few minutes later a man appeared and after a second’s worth of conversation, the woman with the net stockings and the man disappeared through the same door as Beatrice. I felt my mouth fall open.

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘You don’t know that’s her mother.’

  ‘I bet it is.’

  ‘Isn’t.’

  ‘An aunt then. Why else would she kiss her?’ Rachel was stubborn. ‘I’m sure it was her mother,’ she insisted again, after a moment. ‘I’m going to ask her. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I will too.’

  We didn’t talk much on our way home. I think I wasn’t too sure what a prostitute was, though I didn’t want to let on. But I knew it was bad and over dinner that night, I said to my mother, ‘Rachel says Beatrice’s mother is a pute.’

  My mother gave me one of those dark warning looks which always made me feel that if I breathed another word I would cross over into a world from which there was no return.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Wherever does the girl get such ideas.’

  ‘We saw her,’ I ventured. I didn’t want to be stopped. Perhaps I also wanted to see how far my mother would go to defend Beatrice. ‘With net stockings and with a man.’

  My mother glared. There were two bright pink spots in her cheeks. ‘Beatrice’s mother is a poor harassed woman who works part time in a laundry and part-time cleaning other people’s houses. And I think you and Rachel have better things to do than imagine lies about other people’s lives. Like maths, for one. You’ve had quite enough dinner, Maria.’ She sent me to my room.

  I think I believed my mother, but I did nothing to contradict the rumours Rachel excitedly put round at school.

  It was soon after this that Beatrice broke her leg and came to live with us. I asked her one night, ‘Beatrice, do you know what a pute is?’

  She looked at me with her big round eyes and thought for a moment. ‘No. What is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure either,’ I mumbled, hid my embarrassment in a book.

  Perhaps she read my mind, for she said then, ‘I wish my mother were like yours. And that I had no father.’

  For some reason this irritated me and I cut her off. ‘I do have a father. He just doesn’t live in France.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Her lower lip quivered as it often did if I was harsh with her. This irritated me more than ever and I stomped from the table only to be sent back seconds later by my mother who was rightly convinced that my homework wasn’t finished.

  I gaze out my window at the sliver of a moon and think of Beatrice and my mother. Suddenly I am rapt by the sight of a couple embracing in one of the attic window’s opposite. Their shadowy silhouettes are folded round one another, their faces locked. Passion is so much of their stance that I can feel its heat le
aping through the air, kindling my skin. It is a long time since I have felt this particular warmth. It confuses me. As too does the intensity of my spying on another’s intimacy. I look away and then despite myself turn back. I want that woman’s heat, that blending into the body of another.

  I stare, watch the woman ease out of the embrace, and all at once from the lilt of her hair round her neck, the movement of her hand, I am convinced she is Beatrice. Beatrice. The notion devastates me. In all my musing on Beatrice, I have never associated her with passion. Is this one time chambre de bonne, where the good bourgeoisie kept their maids, the site to which Beatrice and her husband retreat to play out their marital passion far from the children’s eyes? I try to see the man’s face, but he is unclear to me. And then, as if they sense the avidity of my watching, a curtain is drawn.

  Sleep evades me that night and when it finally comes, I am bitterly complaining to my mother about Beatrice. The single white streak in my mother’s hair has disappeared. She is young, her face unlined, but her voice is the same - reasonable, persuasive. I have so much still to learn, she tells me. And then she runs off with a cheerful wave of the hand.

  ‘I’m going to meet your father,’ she says.

  -17-

  Despite the notice which announces it as a one-time up market marriage agency where Peter, Earl of Savoy, brought together the most beautiful of continental aristocrats in order to pair them off with English Lords, the Savoy Hotel has an old-fashioned solidity, as comforting as Sunday lunches of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding served on trays of heavy silver. It hushes the voice, implants the sturdy decorum of tweed skirts and twinsets and averted eyes. I like this London of stiff backbones and soothing invisibility, though it was Paul Arnault’s decision that I stay here, close to legal London, and not too far from the Old Bailey. Miles, however, from the Colindale newspaper library as I discovered to my dismay this morning when I trekked out there; and to my frustration this evening as the tube shuddered and screeched me back. The erratic sprawl of London never ceases to amaze me.

  I have been in the city for two days. It is the first time I have been here this long without ringing Robinson. When I used to fly over from New York, Robinson’s was always amongst the numbers I dialled first. Robinson Muir, whom I have known since I was a slip of a girl, even before I met Beatrice, and who with a hiatus or two has remained a friend ever since. Robinson, who still occasionally calls me ‘Mare’, after the horse we both rode on that childhood farm in Kent. But it is well over a year, perhaps two, since I last spoke to Robinson and I don’t know whether I have the courage to do so now. The trouble with Robinson is that he always elicits honesty - not in words necessarily but within oneself.

  I lie in the hot porcelain whiteness of the bath and think of Robinson in his perennial tweed jacket and worn jeans, a scarf in some outlandishly bright colour always dangling from his neck.

  Robinson turned up in New York when I was nearing the end of my third year at Rutherford, Owen and Marks. We had done little more for some time than exchange the annual Christmas card, and I hadn’t seen him since before my mother’s death. He had come to Paris then on a school trip, a shy, gangling teenager who didn’t know where to put his feet or how to speak without hiding his mouth. Now he had filled out, was a square-jawed man with dreaming eyes, a shock of ash blond hair, and a firm long-legged tread which always reminded me of the wellies we used to wear on his parent’s farm. He had won some kind of fellowship and was doing post-graduate work in biochemistry at Columbia University.

  We met for a drink at a fashionable downtown bar, all chrome and dazzling lights and glossy sculpture. The drink turned into another and another and merged into dinner which ended up with coffee at my apartment. We had years of catching up and growing up to get through and conversation with Robinson was always like a stammering haphazard journey with destination merely an excuse for any number of vertiginous sidetracks. Perhaps he had learned the art in Cambridge common rooms. Not that he was smoothly articulate. Anything but. I often had the sense that his words when they came had burst forth from some deep well of silence where he was most at home.

  It wasn’t that first night that we went to bed together. I suspect he thought I would be insulted if he didn’t take my measure first as a separate intellectual being and rushed things. Robinson had morality and there were any number of fine gradations on his moral scale. It took me a little while to grow attune to them.

  But go to bed we eventually did, though perhaps the first move was mine. There was an inevitability to it, as if all those childhood games, that hide and seek through fields and woods, that burrowing into hay, had been but a preparation, a protracted teasing, which could only abut in this. He proved at once the most alien creature I had ever known and as familiar as the dungarees of his I had grown into like a second skin that first summer at Millhill Farm.

  Making love with Robinson was like coming home: not to a home I had really known, but to that home we all carry within ourselves, wordlessly dreamt of, sensed, unspoken. Bed, with Robinson, was a place which pre-dated speech. It was all languorous slowness. It was all touch and deep silence and that ferny, moist smell he had, like a forest in the depth of night.

  That was another thing. With Robinson, the lights were always off. He didn’t look at me. I realized quite quickly that all those knickers and bodices were invisible to him, or if not invisible, then something of a nuisance. Sex was a serious matter. A dark matter. And because of its dark solemnity, it took on the aura of a mystery. We never referred to it in the course of our long conversations, as if it didn’t exist. But it was always there, like a secret rite, waiting to be engaged upon. If he occasionally stretched out his hand and touched my cheek in the course of the day or inadvertently brushed against me, I would feel the reverberation of his touch deep inside me and I would long to be back in that place which was the consecrated space of our mingled bodies.

  Needless to say, none of this coalesced very smoothly with my relationship with Grant Rutherford. For the first few weeks it didn’t seem to make that much difference. Grant and I were after all old hands by now, and our love-making was like the titillating comic prelude to the main drama which was the serious business of discussing business. But pretty soon, even the comedy became distasteful. My body wasn’t in it.

  Then one Sunday lunchtime, in the midst of one of those monologues, which veered between humour and passion, about his work at the laboratory, Robinson suddenly looked down at his napkin and said, ‘There must be many men in your life.’

  He said it in his off-hand voice, which I had learned signalled discomfort. Robinson was most off-hand when he was most uncomfortable and he was most uncomfortable discussing the intimacies of life.

  I smiled, I hope enigmatically. But he was waiting for an answer and since I could never lie directly to Robinson, I murmured, ‘Some.’

  He took my hand then, a rare event in daylight, and mumbled, ‘I… I wish there weren’t.’ His eyes when he turned them on me were stormy. But there was something else in his face, a distaste, as if he had inadvertently swallowed some rancid milk.

  I squeezed his hand for an answer and vowed to myself that I would speak to Grant at the very nearest opportunity.

  It came a very few days later. We were having a late dinner together in some quiet green and white restaurant in Little Italy. We had just been to an opening at an uptown gallery and had momentarily run out of gossip about whom we had seen with whom, when I took a deep breath and plunged.

  ‘Grant, I think perhaps it’s time we stopped seeing each other after hours.’

  He gave me one of his probing looks and obviously didn’t like what he saw, for he loosened his tie, and that little muscle that sometimes appeared in his cheek when he was angry at meetings went to work.

  I babbled over his silence. ‘We’ve had a good run and it’s not as if it’s all that important to us any more and…’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Grant interrupted me. After a
moment, he asked, ‘Who is he?’ He had his stern face on, the face he used to turn on me in my early days in the firm and I suddenly felt very young and bashful.

  ‘An old friend. I’ve known him since we were children.’

  ‘Really,’ he paused. ‘It won’t last a month.’

  ‘It has already.’ I was bold. I didn’t like his tone.

  We stared at each other, sparring partners until the last. The icy glint in his eyes matched his voice when eventually he said, ‘And you intend to stay on at the firm?’

  ‘I really didn’t think that was at issue.’

  ‘Come on,’ Grant screeched his chair away from the table and manoeuvered me out of the restaurant as quickly as bill-paying could allow. ‘We can have coffee at your place.’ It was a threat.

  We drove back without saying a word, but with great surges of horsepower and squealings of brakes. For some reason, I had really not anticipated Grant’s anger. There must have been a blind childishness about me at the time. When he had parked, I said, ‘I don’t think you should come up, Grant. Not tonight. Not in this mood.’ I tried a little laugh to lighten the tone of things. I wanted him to approve of me. I wanted things to go on as before, but for one small matter.

  He tried to kiss me and I didn’t struggle. I gave him my lips. They were colder than the November night.

  He stared at me for a moment in the shadowy lamplight. ‘I see,’ he said, then added, his voice gruff, ‘I want to meet this man.’

  I was appalled at the notion. ‘That won’t be possible,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Why ever not? Are you ashamed of him?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then I’ll take you both out to dinner.’ He leafed through the pages of his diary. ‘Say next Thursday. You can confirm with Anita when you come in tomorrow.’

  Anita was his secretary and it was the first time one of our after-hour meetings was to make its way to her attention. It was his way of signalling a change: from now on my access to him would be through his secretary. Grant had an inimitable way of scoring points. It was probably what had kept our relationship alive for so long.